I don't even imagined that all I needed to make animations was there all the time: You can set start and end states and Daz generates all scenes between them.

My dilemma now is that is begins with 30 frames. If we put the way in and the way out, the minimum is 60 frames. I believe we only need to render the first 30 and use the images backwards to have the return move.

Creators usually render 30 times the same scene? With 40 minutes per scene, I will take more then a day.

Do you guys have any techniques to reduce this effort? Maybe render only frame 1, 5, 10... for example. Or reducing quality for animations scenes. Can you share something?

I think you need to really think about, what you are rendering, and to get rid of as much from the scenes as possible.So, if you make an animation on a bed, the bed will be background, and you probably don't need walls (atleast not all of them), ground, ceiling or any props outside the picture (unless you need them for shadows etc.).But in general, yes you do need a lot of time to render it.

I was thinking about reduce the number of frames, for any test run, just to make sure that when I was ready to do the whole animation, you'd be pretty sure you only needed to do it once.I never played around with it long enough to test if that was a good way of doing it..

I use AC2, which lets me easily choose the framerate and the animation style (forward, reverse, repeat, ping pong) and lets me vary those things from page to page.

30 frames per second would be crazy, crazy overkill. It would make your game unnecessarily large and slow if hosted on the web. And it's well beyond the "bang for the buck" curve. Most animations in our games are 7 to 10 frames. Depending on the return move, a ping pong animation often works. Say you have a 4 frame animation.

Mainstream films and tv shows are 24 frames per second (FPS). Anything beyond that is the realm of HD and 30 fps that high end computer games have. That's not the purpose of an erotic game. Surely not of one Indie produced. If you want TV quality animation then how many seconds do you want it to be? for a 3 second animation that would be 72 pics.But unless your game will be doanloadablem, Tlaero pointed that this approach will make your game unpractical to run online.She and I have healthy argued between the 2 of us how many pics our animations should have. She is ok with a number between 6 and 10. I would wished for more, like 18. But I have to surrender that idea because our games have to be played online and not everyone has a high end computer and internet line. I go with +-12 pics now. That's a number I'm ok with.

Your animated images should match the quality of the rest of your images. In some of my early games, we had GIFs for animations, and they were noticeably lower quality than the rest of the game. They stood out like a sore thumb. I would take 12 frames of 2x quality over 24 frames of 1x quality any day.

That said, always, always, always reduce the image quality of your jpegs. If take a pure jpeg and compress it to 80% quality, and then put them side by side, you'll most likely not be able to tell the difference. But the 80% image will likely be like 1/8th the size. We're talking 100K instead of 800K. I stopped playing Starship Inovanna because I was annoyed by how long it took to download for how short it was. When there are automatic converters like the one that comes in the AC2 distro, it's ridiculous to use uncompressed images.

tlaero wrote:That said, always, always, always reduce the image quality of your jpegs. If take a pure jpeg and compress it to 80% quality, and then put them side by side, you'll most likely not be able to tell the difference. But the 80% image will likely be like 1/8th the size. We're talking 100K instead of 800K. I stopped playing Starship Inovanna because I was annoyed by how long it took to download for how short it was. When there are automatic converters like the one that comes in the AC2 distro, it's ridiculous to use uncompressed images.

Tlaero

That's very true, AC2 has a script to shrink images, right? It's very usefull, but we ended using a another batch program.

Daz Studio render by default to PNG, just changing to JPEG make it go from ~2,5mb to ~350kb, but it loses the transparencies. We reach 768px around 40kb, 1280px around 100kb and 1920px around 200kb.

I saw that in Finding Miranda's package the images have 1250x625 and are around 100kb and they are great. But I once downloaded a game with images having 17kb and they were good, still don't know the magic.

Narigone was studying those things, while I was focused on Daz Studio. But I believe that for animations, we'll have to work together.

Thank you for your sharing.

Ow, another aspect, is about the server. We were using an Amazon basic, in development, when we moved to Netlify, the load time really decreased.

tlaero wrote:That said, always, always, always reduce the image quality of your jpegs. If take a pure jpeg and compress it to 80% quality, and then put them side by side, you'll most likely not be able to tell the difference. Tlaero

Seriously? maybe you need some proper glasses or something, it may work ok for a few images, but take a decent sample of 30, 40, 50 or more images and compress them at 80% as you say, compare them side by side, the big loss of quality will be clear to everyone!

Fofunete wrote:tlaero wrote:That said, always, always, always reduce the image quality of your jpegs. If take a pure jpeg and compress it to 80% quality, and then put them side by side, you'll most likely not be able to tell the difference. Tlaero

Seriously? maybe you need some proper glasses or something, it may work ok for a few images, but take a decent sample of 30, 40, 50 or more images and compress them at 80% as you say, compare them side by side, the big loss of quality will be clear to everyone!

Perhaps you could have the kindness of telling us which picture is compressed (80%), without using any image editing software such as Photoshop and without zooming the picture in (it's 1000X720, the max size for this forum).

Read again what i previously wrote, it may work ok for a few images, it's pointless to show carefully handpicked images as a guarantee it'll always work for all images, take a batch of a dozen photographs all with clear backgrounds, compress them all to 80% and come here say they all look almost the same as the original, sure...

Fofunete wrote:Read again what i previously wrote, it may work ok for a few images, it's pointless to show carefully handpicked images as a guarantee it'll always work for all images, take a batch of a dozen photographs all with clear backgrounds, compress them all to 80% and come here say they all look almost the same as the original, sure...

Then you should put yourself in the right context. We aren't talking about high resolution pictures scrutinized under an image editing software. We're talking about these kind of games pics who don't have a high resolution. Therefore, any difference between an original and a 80% compressed will mostly pass unnoticed if you don't take time and effort to examine them well. For html games with resolutions under 1500 pixels the changes aren't relevant for the naked eye.

Fofunete wrote:Seriously? maybe you need some proper glasses or something, it may work ok for a few images, but take a decent sample of 30, 40, 50 or more images and compress them at 80% as you say, compare them side by side, the big loss of quality will be clear to everyone!

You do understand that I'm a game developer, right? Fifty images? In my last 3 games there are four thousand images.

Actually I think we did Dreaming With Elsa and Redemption for Jessika at quality 70. Mortze convinced me to let him up it to 80 for Finding Miranda. I agreed, but only to humor him. There's little discernable difference between 70 and 80, and none between 80 and 100. You'll have a much harder time finding images where you can tell the difference than you will finding ones where you can't. Usually ones with artificial gradients, etc.